They shaved him bald that first morning in 2008, put him in an orange jumpsuit and made him exercise past dark. • Through the night, as he slept on the floor, they forced him awake for more. • The sun had not yet risen over the Christian military home when Samson Lehman collapsed for the sixth time. Still, he said, they made him run. • The screaming, the endless exercise, it was all in the name of God, a necessary step at the Gateway Christian Military Academy on the path to righteousness. • So when Samson vomited, they threw him a rag. When his urine turned red, they said that was normal. • By Day 3, the 15-year-old was on the verge of death, his dehydrated organs shutting down. • Slumped against a wall, cold and immobile, Lehman recalls men who recited Scripture calling him a wimp. And he thought: Maybe, if I die here, someone will shut this place down. • Not in Florida.

Below, read more of Alexandra Zayas and Kathleen Flynn's yearlong investigation into Samson's experience and others like it.

Truth Baptist Academy is a "semi-military" boarding school in Panama City for boys ages 13 to 17 advertising online to parents "interested in teaching their youth discipline from a Bible standpoint. ".

"Unlike the "accredited" schools," the web site says, "we don't water down these subjects by allowing them to be taught drugs, fornication, homosexuality and other perversion, and are not allowed to behave like a rebellious animal (results of the digressive theory of evolution)."

Police have been called to the facility more than 50 times in the past decade, most often to track down children who ran away. Some of them disappear for several weeks or show up on the other side of the state.

This military school for troubled boys, connected with the international Teen Challenge network, was founded in 1998 by Dave Rutledge and accredited by FACCCA until 2006. Boys are initiated into the program with in-their-face directions from drill instructors and heavy doses of exercise. They must earn their way out of the orange jumpsuits they are given on Day 1.

New Beginnings was a fundamentalist Christian reform home for teen girls that operated for years in Florida but voluntarily moved away in 2007. Girls sent to the Florida campus say they were whipped with switches, made to hold others as they were whipped and made to stand in place for so long they urinated on themselves.

On the old grounds of New Beginnings, Marvelous Grace Girls Academy is run by a street preacher once photographed outside a bar holding a sign about Sodom with a fellow protester who was dressed like Satan. Girls describe a program similar to New Beginnings, where teens are expected to strictly follow fundamentalist Christian ideals.

Marvelous Grace does not have a state license, does not have a religious exemption through FACCCA and is not accredited as a boarding school.

This boarding school for boys takes “recruits” as young as 11 and tries to teach them compliance by giving them rules down to details of how they crease their sheets and where their eyes land.

Consequences for infractions range from exercise to swats to a punishment food called “stuff,” made up of soggy vegetables, swimming in vinegar, designed not to go down easily.

The school's director, Alan Weierman, says he doesn't believe in "boot camps," isn't trying to build "robots" or break his kids down. His "mind, body and soul" approach is to instill discipline that will last.

This 15-month residential program for boys was founded in 2001 and is connected with the international Teen Challenge network. It is not licensed by the state and no longer has a religious exemption under FACCCA.

It has been investigated by state child care officials 20 times in the past 10 years, with credible evidence of abuse found in eight cases, the most recent in 2011.

The school’s director, Maynard Sweigard, denied the abuse, but said the school once used a more rigid format when it followed the model based on a Teen Challenge program in Bonifay (also known as Gateway Christian Military Academy).

In the name of religion, children have been bruised and bloodied and threatened with worse. They've been berated for being gay and subjected to racial slurs. They've been shackled for days and made to exercise until they got sick. A few barely escaped with their lives. Florida regulators say they are powerless to stop it. | Read the first story

The Tampa Bay Times spent a year gathering thousands of pages of public records and interviewing dozens of young adults who passed through the unlicensed group homes that operate in Florida.

The newspaper focused its investigation primarily on homes and reform programs for teens that are exempt from state oversight for religious reasons. Under state law, the authority over those facilities is the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies, a private, nonprofit group.

During its reporting, the newspaper also uncovered and included in its analysis several reform homes that had no state license or FACCCA accreditation. Some of those homes had previously been accredited by FACCCA. Others never had credentials.

For all the homes, the Times requested information on every abuse investigation prompted by calls to the Department of Children and Families’ abuse hotline. The newspaper also talked to dozens of former residents and gathered health inspection reports, 911 dispatch records, police reports and lawsuits related to the homes.

Alexandra Zayas is a general assignment reporter based in Tampa. She has been with the Times since 2005.

Kathleen Flynn is a photojournalist based in Tampa. She has been with the Times since 2002.